Look for Ann Clwyd in the Commons chamber and you will invariably find her on the "awkward" bench, sitting alongside such confirmed lefties as Alice Mahon, Alan Simpson and Jeremy Corbyn. Yet her natural friends think she has been keeping strange company recently.

The Cynon Valley Labour MP's support for the war put her shoulder to shoulder with Tony Blair, Jack Straw and the Tories. She is also, it turns out, on matey terms with Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld - the two most hawkish members of the Bush administration.

It is such a surprising thought - like discovering that Bianca Jagger secretly nips out with Lord Tebbit and the Duke of Edinburgh for a spot of seal-clubbing - that at first I don't believe it. But it is true. The reason is a grim one, to do with a plastic shredder. Queasy readers should stop here.

In one of Iraq's most notorious prisons, Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, there were plastic shredders. They were a bit like an office paper shredder, except more robust, because they were designed to mince up old plastic. There, though, they were used to shred people. Just before the Americans arrived, Ms Clwyd says, the Iraqis "were executing all the remaining prisoners, and that's why nobody is found alive at any of the prisons".

But just before the war, Ms Clwyd met people in Kurdistan who had been in Abu Ghraib - "in fact they were the last people to come out alive" - and they confirmed the story. "People were either put in head first, or foot first. If you went in foot first, it took you longer."

She checked the story afterwards with someone from the prison "and they said yes, there were plastic shredders there and they were dismantled just before the military got there".

She wrote about the shredders and got an email from Mr Wolfowitz "who said he thought it was a spot-on piece and invited me to go and have a talk with him at some point. Well, I've been. It was too good an invitation to miss."

Ms Clwyd was clearly impressed: "What came out during that discussion is that Mr Wolfowitz himself had been a campaigner on Iraq since the end of the 1970s and that human rights in Iraq was a major concern of his - which I'd never realised before, obviously. I had a very interesting hour and a quarter of conversation with him, on Afghanistan, and also on Israel-Palestine."

The idea that he is a superhawk "is a misconception", she says. "He's a very engaging personality, and prepared to discuss any issue. I found it very easy to talk to him and we had a good exchange. I hope that he will come here at some point and come and speak in the House of Commons, and let people put their concerns to him, because I think people will be very interested to meet him in the flesh."

Mentally rubbing my eyes at the thought of Mr Wolfowitz popping in to address the parliamentary Labour party, I asked Ms Clwyd whether, perhaps, she thought the whole Bush administration had been misrepresented?

"I think there is, among some people, a dislike of the US, also there's a view about what US policy might eventually mean. I can only say that Rumsfeld, while I was there, came into the room and I was introduced to him and he had a great line in self-deprecation, which is a welcome thing in a politician.

"I don't know what my colleagues would make of me sitting here, listening to neo-conservatives. It's why I haven't talked about it here, people might misunderstand it."

To understand Ms Clwyd's position, which has caused her considerable discomfort with friends, you have to understand her years of campaigning on Iraq. She set up Indict, an organisation to look into war crimes, but despite visiting 15 countries and collecting evidence from many of Saddam's victims, "we were not able to persuade the attorney general here to take the necessary action".

The idea was that this could have stopped the war, by singling out the bad guys at the top. "Over the last year, I've felt quite desperate at times because I knew that there was going to be a strong possibility of military action, but I also thought that the UN could have set up a war crimes tribunal on Iraq, as it did on the former Yugoslavia while Milosevic was still head of state."

Would that really have averted war? "It might have done. I was feeling frantic at times: I think from what our lawyer told us, a cracking international human rights lawyer, there was a possibility that it could be done and I had to exhaust every avenue in an attempt to get it done."

The last stand

In the end, of course, she failed, so Ms Clwyd supported the military action on human rights grounds. Weapons of mass destruction were never, for her, the main issue though she thinks Tony Blair genuinely believed they existed. "I still think people have to be a bit more patient. Maybe at the end of the day they will not be found, but I don't think that negates the humanitarian reasons for going to war."

During her campaigning, "We used to get documents saying who had died in a prison and their methods of execution. Sometimes I could hardly believe what I read myself, and I'd say, please check it."

After the 1988 Halabja chemical attack on the Kurds no one initially believed what had happened. "The Foreign Office ministers - Waldegrave and Mellor - said there's no proof, and we never got any proof for them because later in the year they went to a trade fair in Baghdad and shook hands with them." She has no doubt that Saddam did have chemical weapons before the war.

Since then Ms Clwyd has been to Iraq again, this time with a brief to report back directly to the prime minister. She was attacked in a convoy heading for Kurdistan - "it was a serious attack" - but says Baghdad itself is remarkably normal.

"When we saw those missiles night after night streaking across the sky I can't believe that there seems to be so little damage. Touring round the streets what you see is people going round the markets, like you would anywhere, and stores with fruit and vegetables and eggs, and legs of lamb hanging in butchers' windows."

The real issue, she argues, is security. Everyone she spoke to talked about the danger of spasmodic attacks by the Iraqi Republican Guard, fedayeen and high-ranking Ba'athists. She had seen a document she could not authenticate suggesting the Ba'ath party had been told to play a guerrilla role "ready for the big comeback - now if that were true it would obviously explain some of the sporadic attacks".

Talking to people on the street, though there was no antagonism, some had turned their heads away "and when I asked somebody else why they weren't speaking to me they said it was because they thought Ba'athists were watching and may come back, and then they'll get into trouble.

"They [the Iraqis] need to know what happened to Saddam and to his two sons as well. There is still a residual fear. The Iraqi people still need closure."

Back home, Ms Clwyd remains a target of anger for anti-war colleagues, but she downplays any problems in the Commons and insists she has barely changed her views since 1970. She's Labour, she says, not New Labour. She was disappointed not to be made international development secretary when the party came to power, but consoles herself with the work she did on Iraq and the Kurds.

And she is a little amused that the new development secretary, Baroness Amos, has cancelled her visit to Iraq. "A Foreign Office official who was supposed to come with me was told that she couldn't go because it was too dangerous. I thought it was quite amusing that it was all right for an elected politician to go but not for an official. I felt it was all right to go, but maybe a government minister would be more of a target. Things do happen."

Ann Clwyd regrets more wasn't done about Iraq in the past. She wishes she could have done more at the time of the Shia and Kurd uprisings that were crushed cruelly. But unlike many in politics and the media, she is optimistic. The era of the plastic shredders is over.

Political career: MEP for Mid and West Wales 1979-84; MP for Cynon Valley since byelection in 1984; Chair, Labour backbench committee on defence, 1985-87; Opposition frontbench spokesperson on women (1987-88), education (1987-88), overseas development and cooperation (1989-92), Wales (1992), national heritage (1992-93), employment (1993-94), and foreign affairs (1994-95); Member of the Shadow Cabinet 1989-93; Member of the International Development Select Committee 1997-01; Former Shadow Secretary of State for International Development; Former assistant to John Prescott as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

High: Becoming special envoy on human rights in Iraq after helping Tony Blair minimise the Commons rebellion over the war.

Low: Using her Commons privilege to verbally attack a plastic surgeon whom she referred to as a psychopath.